sgag wrieFri on 18 Sep 2009 01:51:07:
At 01:18 AM 9/18/2009, SA wrote: [clip] And that's from a think tank that's totally in the tank for Obama-care. SA
shag] oh for christ sake SA. thanks for making me look. I have been avoiding looking at this trainwreck because i knew that it would make me angrier than swarm of bees trapped in a jam jar! I'd like to spit hot nails out of my eyeballs!
i was just counting on y'all to look and then discuss so I wouldn't have to actually look and then get so pissed off at the utter insanity of it all.
I was pissed last week, before vaca, and I wrote a nasty jab at all these bloggers I knew -- feminist women of color who'd supported obama and would blab on about how he was an advance over Clinton, telling everyone it had nothing to do with race, yadda yadda yadda. They'd go on about how much more progressive he was than Clinton. And I'd just read them and my eyes would glaze over, exhibiting all the signs of crambe reptitia.
I hope those women are now ashamed of themselves for such foolishness.
and that is my polite response.
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I don't think shag should be angry. Anger does not seem a useful political response here, nor does it contribute to clear political understanding. And this leads me to the following observations on the definition of political terms. Incidentally, I think this applies to literary terms to: e.g., any definition of poetry that does not include, as poetry, the works of the Swet Singer of Michigan, will be defective. That is, any definition of poetry must cover bad poetry as well as good poetry.
That literary observation only partly carries over to politics, but it is, I think, a good starting point. A definition of "liberal" should not include a condemnation, particularly a moral or intellectual concemnation, of liberals. Indignation at liberals leeds no place useful. Nor, I fear, does indignation at radicals who operate from such incorrect definitions., I'm retracting in part, that is, my Friday posts on complaining at beubg wet bt the rain, and will attempt to restate the reasoning more carefully.
I won't try to offer a formal definition of "libneral" or "liberalism," but I will try to sketch out what such definitions, to be politically useful, shold allow for.
Consider the passage (deleted above) from SA's post quoted from the liberal web site, exhibiting the deficiencies of the proposed health care plan and the hardships it would impose on so many families.
What is shag angry at? It doesn't really make sense to be angry at an abstract set of words, the plan itself. Anger usually has to be at an agent, and so this agner is: at the bloggers (liberal feminists of color) who support Obama. What I want to argue is that their error is intellectual and political, not personal and moral, and that the premises which lead to their positions.
Start with Jimmy Carter, a prfoundly _moral_ man, and his famous (or infamous) statement that "The World is not Fair." (In substance, this is the same, but less crudely put, than There is No Alternative.) The world is not fair, and the goal of the liberal is, _within the limits set by that fact_ to make the world "more fair." And not that there is a hell of a lot of evidence to back this point up. Is it "fair" that my life should have been so terribly distorted over the decades by migraine, depression, defective hearing (probably from driving tractor as a teenager), and macular degeneration. Clearly the question is a silly one. Of course it's "not fair," but it's no one's fault. That is just how the world is. And from the position of Jimmy Carter, the web site SA quoted, and the bloggers who offend shag, democracy (for that is what they, SINCERELY, call wht we call capitalism) is not fair, and will nvever be fair, but any alternative will be worse, and all we can do is, slowly and with many twists and turns and defeats, edge towards a democracy that will be less unfair.
So a first approximation, clumsy but I think points in the right direction, of liberalism: The belief that inan unfair world we should try by means that do not threaten democracy to alleviate the necessary and uanavoidable misfortune and unhappiness which characterize the world, and that this democacy is so precarius, so surrounded by enemies who would destroy it in the name of some impossible ideal (soc8ialism, Islam, 1000 Year Reich) that, again unfortunately, we must inflict a good deal of pain on innocent people (Vietnamese peasants, Afghan villages) in order to protect and perhaps eventually expand this small island of _relative_ decency on which we live.
And it is really unfair to call such sincerepeople names. They are only doing their best in a difficult world.
(To be continued, maybe, if I can figure out the next steps.)
Carrol